SOUTH SHORE INSIDER: EMD Serono's Lisa Costantino

Lisa Costantino of Norwell started working in the accounts-payable department at the Rockland biotechnology and pharmaceutical company EMD Serono when she was fresh out of high school. Over three decades, up to and through Serono’s acquisition by the German company Merck KGaA in 2007, ...

By Dan Schneider

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

By Dan Schneider

Posted Oct. 24, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 24, 2013 at 10:10 AM

By Dan Schneider

Posted Oct. 24, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 24, 2013 at 10:10 AM

ROCKLAND

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Lisa Costantino started working in the accounts-payable department at the Rockland biotechnology and pharmaceutical company EMD Serono when she was fresh out of high school.

Over three decades, up to and through Serono’s acquisition by the German company Merck KGaA in 2007, Costantino has moved up through the ranks at Serono, serving in just about every position within the finance department. Today, she is the company’s chief financial officer.

Costantino, who lives in Norwell, was named to the board of directors at South Shore Hospital in August. That placed her at an unusual intersection within the health-care industry. On one side, she works at a for-profit company that makes medicine; on the other, she will now serve an end user of EMD Serono’s products, a nonprofit hospital.

Constantino hopes she’ll be able to bring benefits to both organizations.

How do you think you’ll be able to positively leverage your positions at South Shore Hospital and EMD Serono?

Although we’re both in the same industry, we have very different challenges at Serono and South Shore Hospital. I’m hoping that I can bring some of the things at my company to them, and vice versa, because they do have a very different model.

They’re very much into the “lean” model between all of their different departments at the hospital, which we don’t do at Serono. It’s all about making sure that you’re driving efficiency and doing things that benefit the patient. So I’m hoping to bring some of that back.

How has EMD Serono changed since its acquisition by Merck KGaA in 2007?

It was probably the best thing that could have happened to us. When the company was up for sale, Johnson & Johnson was in the picture, Pfizer was in the picture.

If any of those companies had acquired us, I don’t think that we would have kept our prominent U.S. footprint, because they all already had a U.S. footprint. Merck KGaA didn’t have that, an entity that knew the U.S. market and had a revenue and operating base in the U.S.

We’ve had a program from the initiation of ObamaCare, looking at how all of this legislation impacts us as a company. Clearly, all of the biopharma companies have had to anticipate how the laws would impact the top line. You have to understand what the old legislation meant to your revenue, and what the new legislation would mean.

Page 2 of 2 - When people talk about the biopharma industry, they talk about how much money we make. But what they don’t say is how much we invest in innovation. We’ve put about 20 to 25 percent of our revenue into research and development, historically.

Has that investment paid off, either in the U.S. or elsewhere?

I’d say we have about zero percent success in the U.S. in the last five years. Everything we’ve applied for, whether it be product applications, continuations of trials from, say, a Phase II to a Phase III, and even devices, have not been approved.

Abroad, however, there’s a different product portfolio. The European company has other brands, products and consumer health-care lines, and they’ve had success with some of their R&D efforts.